The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  Rashida chose that moment to come in from the garden. Hank lumbered forward, smiling—he always wished to demonstrate his admiration of the human race. ‘Sorry!’ said Pippa, grabbing his collar.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Rashida. ‘I’m not scared of him. I need the bathroom.’

  As she spoke, she glanced around the kitchen. Pippa felt compelled to say, ‘We’ve been meaning to fix up this place ever since we moved in. But renos are such a nightmare!’

  ‘That’s the problem with old places,’ said Rashida. ‘Everything needs fixing. And you need a light on in the middle of the day.’

  ‘The cooker’s new,’ said Pippa. ‘And the surfaces are a bit worn but they’re really clean, actually.’ The idea that Muslims were big on hygiene had suddenly ballooned in her mind. ‘Hank’s not usually allowed in the kitchen,’ she went on. ‘I’ll just put him outside for a minute so he can have a run around the yard while you’re gone.’

  ‘I’d love a yard,’ said Rashida. ‘But the best I can do is some herbs in a window box.’

  ‘You’re in Earlwood, aren’t you?’ Pippa improvised, ‘Friends of mine just moved there. Elswick Street, I think, is that near you?’

  ‘I don’t know it. I’m in Ashmead Place, near the river.’

  ‘Sounds nice.’

  ‘It’s just a small flat. But the building’s new, and everything works, and I can walk to the bus.’

  Pippa was repeating silently, Ashmead Place, Ashmead Place.

  When she was alone, Pippa picked up her phone. She hadn’t looked at Facebook for a few hours. Rashida had posted a new photo since then: a spectacular arrangement of white lilies, lisianthus, stock and what seemed to be sweet peas. No one bought flowers like that for themselves. Ferial had already responded: ‘Love, love, love!’ Did that mean that she loved the flowers? Or that they were an expression of love—whose? Pippa’s brain sang: White flowers are the most beautiful. How many times had she heard Matt say that? Not that he ever gave Pippa white flowers. Every year on their anniversary, he produced a gaudy wheel of tropical blooms, because she had once said that she loved cannas as a child.

  Will’s voice insisted: ‘Any writer who consents to publication has compromised their literary integrity by definition.’

  Pippa put her phone on to charge, shifted the tab that locked the screen door to open and picked up the tray.

  A few days later, Pippa’s phone rang. Gloria whispered, ‘I really, really love The Kitchen Diaries. The castration scene is amazing! We were all really blown away. SIMS said it was like a punch to the head.’

  Pippa said, ‘Oh my God! That’s unbelievable. That’s great.’ Then she said, ‘Do you really like it?’

  ‘I love it. It’s so brutal and sexy and unforgiving and raw. Sort of Cormac McCarthy and The Girl on the Train and just the right amount of Kitchen Confidential.’

  ‘I haven’t actually read any of those,’ said Pippa faintly.

  ‘The timing’s so perfect: we’ll be able to springboard off the domestic violence campaign.’ Gloria’s voice almost rose with excitement. ‘Get yourself a good accountant, girl. This is going to go off.’

  Matt and Eva were having dinner with Ronnie, so Pippa stayed back late at work. She studied an email from a newish restaurant reviewer that had come in that afternoon: ‘Hi Pippa, I’ve read through your edited version of my review and I have some concerns. “Comprehensive wine list” has become “fully fleshed wine list”. You’ve changed “minimalist mains” to “naked mains”, and “mussels” to “plump mussels”. “Clean-tasting” has become “succulent”, “toothy, left-field pairing” is now “toothy, provocative pairing”. (“Toothy” was a mistake. I meant “toothsome”, but you didn’t pick that up.)’ The email went on and on, and concluded: ‘So what do all these plump, provocative, glistening, coral pink, naked, fully fleshed, firm, yielding, succulent, yadda yadda changes add up to? Porn. You guys are selling porn. I’m writing restaurant reviews. Please reinstate my original (see track changes in attachment).’

  Pippa emailed, ‘Hi Anastasia, Thanks for your feedback. Moving forward, we’ll definitely think about taking it on board. Cheers, P.’ She sent the review, in her version not Anastasia’s, to production. She dallied on Twitter and Facebook, and spent a little time googling George Meshaw. A translation of his last novel had won a prize—an obscure one, in a country no one would live in if they had a choice. Pippa shut down her computer, touched up her lipstick and left the office, heading for Surry Hills.

  The osteopathy clinic was in a dingy neighbourhood where the rag trade had once flourished. Pippa wandered around while she waited for Rashida to finish up for the day. There were signs of hipsterdom—beards, warehouse conversions, a cocktail bar—but the area remained transitional. Pippa passed a brothel, and two cops bent over a boy who was lying on a wall. Something about the way the boy’s stringy arm lay across his chest reminded Pippa of her brother—he had been dead now for longer than he was alive.

  The streets were noisy with traffic and bustle: office workers cutting through on their way to or from the station, a pub stuffed with drinkers, a woman pulled along by a tiny dog, two men sitting on old car seats on a veranda with Bollywood pouring out of the room behind them. Pippa turned into a street lined on one side with plane trees whose leaves had started to change colour. The European trees, the grotty buildings, the workers in dark jackets streaming past all looked cinematic and remote. This feeling of estrangement crept over her now and then, triggered by lights coming on in windows, the impersonal push of people and cars, a four-wheel drive squeezing around a corner, the realisation that she wasn’t sure which way to turn. Sydney denied all knowledge of her. The past opened like a lit corridor, and Pippa saw the city as it had once been: an enemy. It was a sensation that had grown more unsettling with time—not because Pippa feared that it would remain but because she knew it would not. A different way of being in the world—ignorant, braver—had been lost.

  Just before seven, she positioned herself across the street from the clinic. Presently, a young man came out of the door, soon followed by an older one. Two women emerged together—one was Rashida. The other woman came up the street, towards Pippa, who crossed over to Rashida’s side. She called softly and hurried forward. Rashida turned: her hair was twisted up behind her head, which made her face look naked.

  ‘Amazing!’ said Pippa. ‘They say you never run into anyone you know in a city. How are you? I’ve just had a meeting with a freelancer near here.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Rashida.

  ‘So great to run into you.’ Pippa wondered, Has she been crying? She offered the female code for ‘You’ve lost weight’: ‘You’re looking well.’

  ‘Thanks.’ After a moment, Rashida said, ‘How’re you going?’

  ‘Yeah, good. Listen, do you want to get a drink or something?’

  ‘I’ve got to get home. Sorry.’

  ‘I’m heading towards Central,’ said Pippa. ‘You too? Shall we do that walk and talk thing?’

  They set off together. Rashida walked briskly, looking straight ahead. Her sneakers squeaked with each step. Pippa remembered her grandmother saying that squeaky shoes hadn’t been paid for.

  ‘Hard day?’

  Rashida shrugged. ‘The usual.’

  ‘Just about everyone at my work’s on the 5:2 diet,’ said Pippa, ‘and it’s one of their fast days. I had a team meeting after lunch and for like a whole hour I was trapped in a room full of bad breath.’

  That made Rashida laugh. She asked, ‘How’s the book going?’

  Pippa said that it would be published the following year. ‘My publishers seem pretty excited about it, which is a first.’

  All this information had been on Facebook for weeks, but Rashida acted as if it were news. ‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘Congratulations.’

  A phone was ringing. ‘You should get that,’ said Pippa.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  The Elizabeth Street lights were agai
nst them. As they waited, Pippa said, ‘Matt and I are planning to start a family. Now that my book’s out of the way. Matt’s really keen.’ Her voice, raised against the traffic, sounded stagey and aggrieved.

  The lights changed, and they were caught up in the river of people rolling forward. When they had crossed, Rashida said, ‘My bus is that way.’

  Pippa was wondering, Do we kiss? when Rashida turned, and her face could be plainly read. What was written there was dislike—nothing extreme, just a moderate aversion. It struck Pippa like a blow to the breastbone: shocking, bodily. Somehow it had been for her to assess Rashida, not the other way around.

  Rashida raised her hand: ‘Ciao,’ she said, and was gone.

  Pippa headed for the light rail. She had said what she had come to say. She was damp under her arms. Who had been calling Rashida? She got out her phone to check her messages. Matt was at Ronnie’s—it would have been easy to have left a room and made a call. Sometimes, when he was in the shower, Pippa would try out different passcodes on his phone but she hadn’t cracked the right one yet. She texted him now and checked her Twitter feed. @gloriahallelujah followed @victoriabeckham and @russellcrowe. Someone linked to a photo of Beckett on his haunches contemplating a dog and a cat. Someone else was transforming her house into a space of serenity and inspiration with Marie Kondo. @warmstrong asked, ‘Seriously, Jonathan Franzen, what were you even thinking?’ Pippa remembered that she had forgotten to change ‘toothy’ to ‘toothsome’. She opened Facebook and forgot it again.

  ‘Four,’ announced Vern. ‘Possum again.’ He felt obliged to keep track of roadkill. The B&B was closed for winter, but the McLeods had risen early for the drive to Wellington. Vern was going into hospital to have a benign cyst removed from his bladder; his overnight bag was on the back seat. Glenice was at the wheel. Every time Vern burped, he followed it up with a little cough: a marital substitute for ‘Excuse me’. He was hungry, having had to fast since the previous night; Glenice had fasted too in solidarity and felt resentful now.

  A line of pale green light appeared along the wintry horizon. After a while it gave way to a line of honey, but the air remained dark. Headlights approached. Glenice glanced into the ute as it passed and saw Vern sitting in the cabin with his old grey beanie pulled low over his ears. That meant he would come safely through the procedure. She wasn’t surprised by what she had seen: the anniversary of her son’s death was only two days away. Aidan’s birthday and deathday brought disturbances, presages, twisty, memorable dreams.

  Vern was whistling something without a tune between his teeth. He had whistled like that the night before, on his way to bed. It meant he was afraid. He had wrenched Glenice’s nipples and fastened her hand around him. While she laboured, he whispered, ‘Slut,’ ‘Tart,’ ‘Stinking bitch,’ and—repeatedly—a savage, private name, ‘Thessaly.’ For many years, Glenice had heard ‘Cecily’. Who/what Thessaly was she had never asked or even wondered. Vern groaned and whispered in his happy anguish, and let Glenice rub herself against his shin.

  A month after her son’s funeral, when Glenice was still going around staring at faces and trees as if waiting for them to explode, she had realised that she was going to marry Vern McLeod. He had looked after her car for years, and now he was going to look after her. He had, too—she had no complaints there. A speckled, easygoing man with firm hair, he brought her cups of tea in bed. As soon as her daughter left home, Glenice had informed Vern that they were moving to New Zealand. She felt sorry for him, in the impersonal way that characterised her inner life after Aidan. She was what he had got.

  Glenice kept her eyes on the road and spoke into the heated darkness: ‘Everything will be fine.’

  Vern let out a long breath as if he had been waiting for her to say exactly that, but resumed whistling as the car heaved itself up to the top of the pass and they saw the grainy amber glow that announced the rim of the city. Then he said, ‘Your side. Five.’

  Vern’s operation was scheduled for eleven. They had agreed that Glenice wouldn’t wait with him, as there were errands to run in the city. So when she had handed Vern over to nurses, Glenice had breakfast at a place near the hospital. Afterwards there were the various bits of shopping, and then she drove to Cuba Street. A southerly was on the loose, and everyone was dressed for a polar expedition: beanies, down jackets, fleece. Before the McLeods moved out to the lake and took over the B&B, they had lived in Wellington. Every August, gales laid waste to the rose-red camellias that were Vern’s pride. The wind could turn ferocious in any season; Glenice had seen summer hedges shiver like shorn lambs. Wellington gardens had misty English flowers—forget-me-nots, snowdrops, daphne—and shrubs that Glenice valued not in their fullness but when the lively red claws of leaf buds appeared on their bare branches. The wooden city met some need in her: its frank weather, its cold green hills.

  Four years in, she had discovered the gallery when a hailstorm chased her off the street. The door stuck—it still did—and was set back from the street between two shops that sold vintage clothing. Glenice climbed the stairs and went in. A grey-faced man peered out around a curtain at the far end of the room. He nodded, and returned to his heater and his laptop. He knew Glenice of old: she wouldn’t buy, steal or vandalise anything, and he had no interest in her. His lumpy black cat strolled out, inspected Glenice, tested the patch of light that the window threw on the floor and stalked back into the office.

  Quite often there was something here for Glenice. Today it was a room with a table, a vase, a dish of fruit and part of a window. The hungry blue of the window frame clashed perfectly with the blue of the tablecloth without taking it over. The vase held flowers, mauve, pinky yellow, pale red, blackish—Glenice tried and failed to call up the names of black flowers. The wall was a quiet, mortal sort of pink, and there were sleepy-looking pears slumped on a green dish. It looked to Glenice like the kind of room in which someone had gradually recovered from a long illness. She stared at the painting until her feet died from the cold and then she left.

  The cafe had an inner room, out of draughts from the door. Glenice chose a table by the window and closed prayerful hands around a skinny cappuccino. A baby sent her a radiant smile from the next table. It was Aidan. It was Aidan. Then quite gently it was not. Not-Aidan laughed at his mother’s striped sleeve. He pointed his fleecy toes and gurgled at the waitress hurrying forward with a cloth. The waitress came back with a fresh cup for which she later wouldn’t charge Glenice; her weather was calm, unruffled by ambient turbulence.

  Glenice’s daughter had Skyped on the weekend to say that she was expecting a baby. Glenice received the news with detachment: a child would complicate a divorce. At Easter, she had looked out at the lake one morning and seen Pippa having a meal with a man who wasn’t Matt. The slouchy way they sat at a table floating just above the water made it clear that their bodies were familiar with each other. What had drawn Pippa to this fair, fading man, who was plainer than Matt and at least ten years older? But one of the things Glenice had lost along with Aidan was her curiosity about other people. Pippa, and even Vern, were at the back of her thoughts, which were carrying on their involvement with the painted room. It was those jarring colours that had kept Glenice looking. She was looking at a vanished Australian summer when the children were small. It was the summer when her husband had embarked on an affair with a travel agent called Sandy. Sandy’s mother was Malaysian, so Don called her Shandy: half and half. Before Shandy, there had been Maeve, who had a big, hard spray of golden hair, and before that, Anita from the bank. Glenice kicked up a stink, and Don was hurt. It was only sex—he had thought even she could see that. He had kindly gone on having sex with Glenice too, so it wasn’t as if he was taking anything away from their marriage. In fact, the sex had improved: Maeve and Anita had been instructive. The improvement was what gave Don away every time. Glenice enjoyed the attention he was paying her body but continued to make scenes, and eventually it was curtains for Anita, and later for Maeve.